MONDAY VIEW: Politicians must help to rebuild manufacturing

When I started my business 25 years ago, I was romanced by the grimy, smoky and sooty landscape of bottle kilns and Victorian factories in Stoke-on-Trent.

In the mid-1980s Stoke, the heart of our industrial heritage, was thriving. There were 30,000 people employed in heavy industries, including the pottery sector.

Today, you could count in the low thousands the number of workers who are still making things as Britain used to do so well. Now an automated and much more significantly outsourced Britain has lost its way.

Revolutionary: Pottery entrepreneur Emma Bridgewater calls for action

We used to be a true manufacturing nation, trading on our ingenuity, our engineering prowess and our plain hard graft.

We've lost much of that as companies, led by shareholder demands for profit and dividends, look to higher margins from manufacturing abroad.

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But there is more to life than margins. How do we revive our traditional skills base and become a proud manufacturing nation again? It is a key question facing our politicians as they walk the campaign trail, promising to get Britain back on its feet.

We owe it to future generations to revive and build on what we used to do - to make quality British goods. Why on earth would we want to lose such skills?

Our politicians could begin by looking at the national curriculum. They might make it a compulsory part of the curriculum for all pupils to look in detail at how the Industrial Revolution transformed Britain.

This seismic transformation of the country generated a new breed of entrepreneurs who produced streams of new ideas and ways of working.

There seems to have been a total focus in our schools on technological advancement, and in non-manufacturing business, at the expense of traditional industrial practices.

It is vital that today's children understand why making things is so crucial to helping our economy grow. Surely it is wrong that children, and school groups, don't visit factories in the numbers they used to any more - if at all.

Visitors to our factory in Stoke-on-Trent often say it is the first factory visit they have ever made.

We are failing to gain an understanding of how traditional crafts make our economy tick.

In addition, it is important for children to understand that sometimes there are pitfalls in a fully automated industry - such as a drop in product quality.

Significantly, they would also learn that a factory is like a village - a community in which the everyday conversations and relationships work alongside the main business of making things.

Stoke-on-Trent was once the envy of the world. It produced, and still does produce, more ceramics than any other city on earth. Craft skills have been passed down from generation to generation.

It is imperative that we don't lose those skills. So, as well as re-igniting interest at school level, we need to invest in training to protect the lifeblood of the skills economy in future.

Political parties all appreciate that we need to revive apprenticeships in small and medium-sized businesses but I would like to see a nationwide scheme focused on protecting traditional skills.

Businesses should be asking how they can protect their grassroots skills, and the answer has to be in hiring apprentices who can keep the traditions alive that made that business what it is today.

At Emma Bridgewater - where we produce 5,000 mugs, jugs and plates every day - we are working on our own apprenticeship scheme, searching for the fettlers, platemakers and sponge decorators of the future.

Britain was once great at making things because we invested in skills, both traditional and innovative, which produced quality goods. As an entrepreneur, I don't want to see those British qualities disappear. Manufacturing is a lively and important component of economic recovery.

It is time for the next government to realise that making real things needs to be taken seriously.